Estimating the impact of alcohol consumption on survival for HIV+ individuals.

Abstract

Alcohol consumption is associated with decreased antiretroviral adherence, and decreased adherence results in poorer outcomes. However the magnitude of alcohol's impact on survival is unknown. Our objective was to use a calibrated and validated simulation of HIV disease to estimate the impact of alcohol on survival. We incorporated clinical data describing… (More)

Figure 3. Premature death from alcohol consumption. Lightly shaded regions denote the effect that is attributable to alcohol consumption itself, and darkly shaded regions denote the effect that is attributable to confounding factors rather than to alcohol consumption. Decreased time to treatment failure among drinkers leads to decrements in the survival time. While a substantial proportion of the decrement experienced by hazardous drinkers arises from confounding factors rather than from the hazardous drinking itself, the decrement attributable to hazardous drinking is greater than the decrement attributable to nonhazardous drinking at each frequency.